For years, prominent progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota has been the target of a number of attacks from former President Donald Trump and other Republicans, including rumors that she married her brother.
Lauren Boebert of Colorado is the latest high-profile conservative to revive the claim. Boebert referred to Omar's husband as a member of the "Jihad Squad" in a speech on the House floor.
In a Tuesday statement, Trump accused the woman who came to the US as a young girl of abandoning her country and of marrying her brother.
After coming to America as a refugee with her father and siblings in 1995 she became a US citizen. One of the first two Muslim women to serve in Congress was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives.
Trump praised the work of Scott Johnson at the October rally in Minneapolis.
"Omar is a fraud, including her name," Trump said at the rally. "Scott reports that his sources told him that the legal husband of the woman was the brother of the woman, and that she married him for fraudulent purposes, coming into the United States maybe?"
The rumors of a brother marrying a sister were first spread on an internet forum in 2016 and have been circulating ever since.
Conservatives have claimed that the second husband of Omar is her brother and that she married him to help him get a US green card.
President Donald Trump is in Minneapolis for a campaign rally.
AP Photo/Jim Mone
Some of her story about her marriage history is not true.
There is no hard evidence to prove that Elmi is the brother of the man. There are discrepancies and inconsistencies in her marriage history.
When she first ran for office in 2016 she released a lengthy statement to address rumors that she married her brother, which she called "absurd and offensive," and gave a timeline of her marriage and relationship history.
The couple did not obtain a legal marriage certificate after they married in an Islamic faith ceremony in 2002. They had two children together.
In 2008, the two split in a faith-based, not legal, way.
She married her second husband, Elmi, in 2009.
In 2011, Elmi and Omar separated, but did not get a divorce. Elmi moved back to London.
In 2012 the couple got back together and had a third child, while the man was still legally married to Elmi.
In the year of 2017, he divorced Elmi and then wed Hirsi.
In her divorce filing, she stated that there was an "irretrievable breakdown of the marriage relationship". Their divorce was finalized in November of last year, and they married another woman a month later.
In March 2020, he married political consultant Tim Mynett.
Several public documents obtained and reported by news outlets cast doubt on the official timeline of her marriage and relationship history.
The Star Tribune reported in June that she was fined by Minnesota's campaign-finance watchdog for paying a lawyer with campaign funds to fix her mistake, as federal law prohibits people from.
The Examiner reported that in dozens of publicly available traffic violation and court records, Hirsi listed his address at a single CedarRiverside address consistently in 2006-2010.
The Examiner found a local news article in which it was stated that the couple moved to North Dakota so that they could finish their bachelor's degree in political science.
Complicating matters further, the Star Tribune and the Examiner reported that the address in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights that the couple listed on their marriage-license application was the same address that the couple listed on their business license application.
On Tuesday, January 12, 2021, Rep. Ilhan Omar spoke to reporters in Statuary Hall on Capital Hill.
Kent Nishimura is from the Los Angeles Times.
There is no evidence to support the theory that her brother was her second husband.
There is no evidence to support the theory that Elmi is a brother of the woman who was legally married to another man.
Being a refugee, Omar doesn't have an original birth certificate. She gave a Star Tribune reporter photographs of her and her siblings' original refugee documents and identification cards, but didn't list elmi as one of her brothers. According to the Star Tribune, Elmi is three years younger than her brother, and that he was the youngest of seven siblings.
"For someone like me, who left a war-torn country at the age of 8, who got refugee status to come to America, where in the world am I finding a sibling 15 years later to seek to do what people accuse me of?" she asked.
Some outlets have pointed to social media posts from accounts linked to Elmi in which he posted photos of his son, while she said in her divorce papers that she wasn't in contact with him.
The accounts have been deleted. No news outlets have been able to verify the authenticity of the stories, even if they were true, because they couldn't get in touch with any of the family members who could confirm that they are not related.
Snopes pointed out some holes in the theory that Elmi married him to help him gain citizenship, and that he was his brother.
All of the six siblings gained refugee status in the US, and siblings can sponsor one another for residency status and a green card under US immigration law.
One Minnesota-based immigration lawyer told the Star Tribune that cases of siblings marrying each other to commit immigration fraud were very rare.
It doesn't explain why he left the US and moved to London just two years after getting married if he had intended to marry a fraudulent person.
If Elmi went to such lengths to commit marriage fraud to stay in the United States, it makes sense that he wouldn't have responded to the multiple attempts to serve him with divorce papers, given that she would have been his sponsor for a green card.
Jeremy Slevin told the Star Tribune that since she was elected to office, Ilhan has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false accusations about her personal life. Even when it is personally painful, Ilhan has shared more about her personal life than most public officials do.
"Legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate, whether they are colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members."
